Amplifier Collocations in the Chinese Learner English Corpus

Jennie, Cai

2006-06-02

Contents Abstract ILiterature Review IIMethodology IIIData Analysis and Discussion IVPedagogical Implication VReferences VIAppendix

Abstract This paper analyzes the usage of amplifiers in the

Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) by analyzing their occurrence in collocations.

Amplifiers, such as absolutely, completely, really, and very, were considered to express degrees of increasing intensification upwards from an assumed norm…”

Maximizers: “maximally intensify the sense of an adjective or verb”

boosters: “signify less than maximal intensity” (p.469). (Kennedy, 203, p. 469)

Abstract This paper uses the mutual information measure

(MI) to examine the collocational usage of 23 amplifiers, including 7 maximizers and 16 boosters in CLEC.

maximizers: fully, completely, entirely, absolutely, totally, perfectly, and utterly

Boosters: very, really, particularly, clearly, highly, very much, extremely, badly, heavily, deeply, greatly, considerably, severely, terribly, enormously, and incredibly.

Abstract

According to Kennedy (2003), these amplifiers are the most frequent in the British National Corpus (BNC) and all except utterly, severely, terribly, enormously, and incredibly occur at least 30 times per million words (p.472).

I Literature Review 1. Research Orientation Adverbs | Adverbs of degree | \ Amplifiers downtoners | \ Maximizers boosters

I Literature Review

2. Previous Studies Klein (1998) claims that “Grading of an

expression is possible if an inherently gradable feature is present (p. 9).”

Figure 1 Table 1

I Literature Review 2. Previous Studies Kennedy (2003, p. 470) introduces recent

corpus-based researches on amplifier collocations by Paradis (1997), Lorenz (1999), Biber et al. (1999).

They begin to notice “differing preferences across registers and associations with different adjectives. (Biber et al., 1999, p. 564, as cited by Kennedy, 2003, p. 471.)”

ILiterature Review 2. Previous Studies

Lorenz’s (1999) discovers that German learners of English may overuse particular modifiers (as cited by Kennedy, 2003, p. 470). This inspires me to study how Chinese learners of English use amplifiers.

II Methodology 1. Procedure In this study, I need the complete file of

CLEC.txt that contains 1,331,133 running words. The corpus tools are Wordsmith 4 and a MI score calculator.

MI=log2 ((f (n, c) * N) / (f (n) * f (c)).• N: tokens (running words) in text• F (n): frequency of the keyword• F (n, c): frequency of the collocation• F (c): frequency of the word modified

II Methodology 2. Defection Notes Clear (1999) warns that MI score will be very

unreliable if F (n, c) is low. Low f (n, c) may result in high MI score; yet, its reliability is restricted within the specific corpus.

For example, decayed only appears twice in CLEC and it co-occurs with completely twice, then the MI score is as high as 13.88

Their MI score is less than 3.9 in BNC (Kennedy, 2003, p. 475).

IIMethodology 2. Defection Notes

Defection of the Frequency of Verb Collocate

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Absolutely tends to associate with imperative

or assertive words such as should, necessary, not, and no. Only 14.8% collocates are adjectives including three positive ones (valuable, good, and necessary) and a negative one (negative). Its relative frequency in CLEC is only half of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Completely collocates with abolition or

negation adjectives or participles such as deprived, forgotten, destroyed, impossible, and fake, which accounts for 40% adjective collocates. The most frequent adjective collocate—Different–accounts for 36% adjective collocates. .

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Entirely has only one adjective collocate—

different. The verb CONSIST accounts for 22.8% collocates and this is specific to CLEC due to the composition topic. Its relative frequency in CLEC is less than half of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Fully collocates mostly with verbs. All verb

collocates are neutral in nature (maybe slightly positive, such as agree), which is in contrast with Kennedy’s result that fully “has exclusively positive associations” in BNC. Its relative frequency is approximately 1/3 of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Perfectly has exclusively neutral verb

collocates whereas it has exclusively positive associations in BNC.

• Totally has negative, positive, and neutral adjective collocates such as deaf, innocent true, and different respectively. This is in contrast with Kennedy’s result that totally tends to have mainly negative associations.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Badly has 65% negative adjective / participle

collocates (deformed, hurt, polluted, ill) and 35% neutral ones (insulated, treated, needed). The four negative collocates seem to be incorrect word choices, yet it reflects the writers preference of negative collocates when using badly.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Clearly tends to collocate with perception and

verbal skills. For instance, remember, know, see, hear, understand, and think are all related to human perception. Stated and express are related to verbal skills. Clearly mainly collocates with verbs. Its relative frequency is less than half of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Considerably only has one collocate—long

that meets the constraints. Its relative frequency is just 1/10 of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Deeply mainly shows its figurative meaning

and collocates with verbs that indicate influence (impressed, affected, encouraged, interested), emotion (moved, loved, love, hurt), and perception (felt, remember, think, know.) Deeply only associate with plough to show its literal meaning. Its relative frequency is nearly twice of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Extremely tends to collocate with negative

adjectives as brutal, expensive, ill, serious, and hard. It has positive collocate (important) and neutral collocate (round, expensive (negative or neutral)). Its relative frequency is less than half of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Greatly tends to collocate with more passive

verbs and less active verbs. It shows preference to positive collocates, yet, it also collocates with negative ones (damaged, suffer, decreased) and neutral one (changed, different). Its relative frequency is about five times of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Heavily has three verb collocates related to

punishment, strike, and smoke. Its relative frequency is a bit more than half of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Highly mostly collocates with positive words,

with a neutral adjective (sensitive) as well. Its relative frequency is less than half of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Really has mainly positive/neutral collocates,

with the exception of suffering, sorry, and hard. Its relative frequency is nearly 3/4 of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Severely collocates with words related to

punishment and suffering. The seven occurrence of disfigured is specific to one composition topic. It seems that severely mainly has negative collocates.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Terribly only has one collocate—sorry that

meets the constraints. Its relative frequency is just 1/10 of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Very mainly associates with adjective

collocates including a lot more positive ones than negative ones. Its relative frequency is more than twice of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Very much tends to associate with verb

collocates that are related to human emotion, such as hate, envy, like, love, enjoy, and miss. Another frequent collocate is thank because of the fixed pattern thank you very much. Its relative frequency is more than four times of that in BNC.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Chinese learners tend to overuse general

amplifiers such as very, very much, greatly, and deeply. On the other hand, learners tend to underuse less frequent amplifiers such as considerably, fully, and entirely..

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Chinese learners tend to modify verbs with most

amplifiers, except very, totally, and extremely. The lack of adjective collocates may indicate that students tend to produce less complicated structures, compared with native speakers.

• In addition, students tend to use amplifiers in fixed patterns such as terribly sorry, thank you very much, completely different, badly needed, and think highly. This may indicate that fixed patterns have been fabricated in learner’ interlanguage.

• As to the amplifier + adjective patterns, learners need to be provided with more authentic materials, together with the teacher’s explicit awareness-raising instructions.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• Chinese learners tend to associate most

amplifiers with both negative, neutral and positive collocates, ignorant of the negative/positive preference of certain amplifiers to some extent. For instance, totally has mainly negative collocates in BNC; yet in Chinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC), it collocates with positive words like clean, true, better, innocent.

III Data Analysis and Discussion• There are word choice mistakes or rare usages with

adverbs, such as deeply polluted, heavily beat, badly polluted and so on. The cause for this misuse is obvious once we translate these expressions word for word into Chinese. According to Gass and Selinker (2001), negative transfer causes the misuse (pp. 67-68). Positive transfer is apparent as well if we translate the frequent collocations such as absolutely necessary, clearly stated, deeply moved, greatly helped and so on. Language transfer inevitably occur but negative transfer is avoidable.

IV Pedagogical Implication• It is not sufficient for students to master the usage of

modifiers only by memorizing the meaning of individual amplifiers and syntactic rules that adverbs modify adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. As Hunston and Francis (1996) stated that corpus studies “suggest that all language is patterned (p. 14)”, and Knowles, G. & Zuraidah (2004) also claimed that “relatedness is the starting point for the study of the lemma”. Thus I suggest that pattern usage of amplifiers should also be emphasized explicitly through teachers’ direct teaching and implicitly through students’ exposure to authentic materials.

IV Pedagogical Implication• The increasingly larger corpus can serve as a

huge pool of authentic materials and increasingly powerful corpus software can enable us to obtain more and more convincing results as EFL instructions. A comparative study of authentic language data

and textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language has revealed that the use of grammatical structures in textbooks differs considerably from the use of these structures in authentic English. (Dieter Mindt, 1996, 232, as cited by Hoye, 1997, 231 )

• Therefore, the teacher should always search for authentic teaching materials.

IV Pedagogical Implication• In addition, as Firth’s (1957) famous statement that

“you shall know a word by the company it keeps (195).” Learners will understand a word better by paying attention to its preference to negative or positive collocates. As to adverbs of degree, Klein (1998) proposes two hypotheses regarding this:

• (14) adverbs of degree may be specified for emotive value; if so, they are sensitive to the evaluative polarity of the modified element (p. 3).

• (100) Hypothesis: adverbs of degree may be specified for emotive value; if so, they are sensitive to the evaluative polarity of a statement. (p. 109).

IVPedagogical Implication• If a word frequently collocates with negative or

positive words, then it may acquire a negative or positive “scent.” As a result, it prefers negative or positive words even more. Teachers and learners should pay attention to the negative and positive preference of certain words which are not limited to amplifiers. This actually belongs to the study of semantic prosody, which is a greatly attractive area of research.

VReferences• Biber, D., Conrad, S. & Reppen, R. (2000). Corpus Linguistics. Beijing: Foreign

Language Teaching and Research Press.• Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (2000).

Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

• Bolinger, D. (1972). Degree words. The Netherlands: Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

• Clear, J. (1999). Re: Corpora: T-score in collocational analysis. Retrieved on May, 10, 2006 from http://torvald.aksis.uib.no/corpora/1999-4/0146.html

• Firth, J. R. (1957). Papers in Linguistics. London: Oxford University Press.• Gass, S. M. & Selinker, L. (2001). Second language acquisition. Mahwah, New

Jersey, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.• Hoye, L. (1997). Adverbs and modality in English. London and New York:

Longman.• Hunston, S. & Francis, G. (1996). Pattern Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:

John Benjamins Publishing Company.• Kennedy, G. (2003). Amplifier Collocations in the British National Corpus:

Implications for English Language Teaching. TESOL Quarterly 37 (3) 467-487.• Klein, H. (1998). Adverbs of degree in Dutch and related languages.

Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.• Knowles, G. & Zuraidah Mohd Don. (2004). The notion of a “lemma”:

Headwords, roots and lexical sets. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9 (1).

Thank you very much!

Questions?